Summary
Engineering executive with 22 years building software and AI systems, and developing the engineers and leaders who run them, from 0-to-1 through hyperscale. Now leads engineering for Enterprise AI at Yahoo. Before that, conceived, architected, and built Amazon’s first-party physical-security platform from a self-built prototype into the system of record for 1,700 buildings and 100,000+ employees worldwide, with $500M+ in projected savings, and grew the people who ran it, including three leaders promoted to L7 and a support specialist who became an engineer. Earlier, led the AI/ML team behind Cisco’s Spark/Webex Assistant, the world’s first AI-powered meeting assistant, and founded a startup that drew an acquisition offer from Google before exiting. Pairs founder-level technical depth (still hands-on with architecture and applied AI) with executive-scale organizational leadership.
Career Highlights
- Conceived, architected, and built a first-party, cloud-native security platform at Amazon, designing the full end-to-end solution including a custom hardware component. Built the initial product on independent initiative after the proposal was first passed over; a working demo won full executive funding, and over eight years the platform grew into Amazon’s global system of record for physical security, running at 99.94% availability.
- Grew the people who ran it: promoted three leaders to L7 and 10+ engineers and managers into senior roles over eight years.
- Drove $500M+ in projected Opex/Capex savings as the system of record for 1,700 buildings, 100,000+ employees, 55,000+ security guards, 300,000+ cameras, and 1.2M+ managed devices.
- Led the team that shipped the world’s first AI-powered voice assistant for meetings (Cisco Spark/Webex Assistant), still powering Webex hardware today.
- Founded and architected a social-location mobile platform as sole technical founder (custom C/C++ in-memory DB, <10ms median); drew a Google acquisition offer and exited (2016).
- Re-platformed Last.fm (43M+ users) onto the graph-database platform behind CBS’s entertainment portfolio - a service CBS Interactive acquired for $280M.
Experience
YahooOct 2026 - Present
Senior Director of Engineering, Enterprise AI
- Leads engineering for Enterprise AI at Yahoo.
Amazon Web Services (AWS)Apr 2018 - Jun 2026
Head of Engineering, Physical Security Technology
- Unified the AWS Security Operations Center (SOC), Amazon Corporate Security tech-ops, and the platform engineering team under one technical and product leadership within one year, consolidating three roadmaps across 17 teams, 147 Amazon employees, and 850+ contractors spanning software, hardware, and operations.
- Built the management bench that ran the platform: hired and developed the leaders of 17 teams, secured the organization’s first principal-level TPM promotion in four years, and served on the Security organization’s promotion panel nearly every year since 2019, while owning budget, headcount planning, and resource allocation end to end.
- Architected the convergence of three siloed security domains into one cloud-native platform on AWS, layering AI analytics (anomaly detection, predictive modeling, and multi-modal foundation models) and automation across aggregated telemetry that cut false alarms 56%, investigation time 98%, and on-call hours 60%, underpinning $500M+ in projected savings.
- Ran the platform at 99.94% availability as the global 24/7 system of record for physical security, versus about 97% for the legacy systems it replaced, and delivered the first Amazon data centers to run entirely on first-party access control.
- Aligned executive stakeholders across Amazon (corporate security, corporate real estate, finance, legal/PR) on multi-year platform strategy and funding.
Cisco Systems2016 - 2018
Sr. Manager, Emerging AI Technologies · Sr. Software Engineer, Emerging Technologies
- Led the team that built Cisco’s enterprise AI meeting assistant, launched as “the world’s first AI-powered voice assistant for meetings” (Spark Assistant, 2017), now Webex Assistant.
- Delivered a portfolio of enterprise AI products absorbed into Webex, including an always-on AI meeting agent (Team TV) and VR collaboration on the Oculus Store.
Ivy (Spot Industries, Inc.)2014 - 2016
Founder & Chief Architect · drew a Google acquisition offer; exited via acquisition
- Architected and built the entire backend 0-to-1 as sole technical founder, including a custom in-memory database and the full distributed-systems foundation (service discovery, message bus, delivery automation) on AWS.
CBS Interactive2011 - 2014
Sr. Manager, Engineering · Sr. Technology Manager · Sr. Software Engineer
- Led engineering across a portfolio reaching 60M+ monthly unique users (TVGuide.com, TV.com, Metacritic, Last.fm).
- Built the graph-database platform behind CBS’s entertainment portfolio, re-platforming Last.fm (43M+ users), and built the backend powering Verizon Wireless’s flagship Viewdini video app.
Earlier2004 - 2011
Sr. Software Engineer, Clicker Media (acq. CBS) · Software Engineer III, Ask.com
- Co-built Clicker Predict, a real-time recommendation engine (Facebook Instant Personalization launch partner, with Pandora), and helped take search “beyond 10 blue links” with Smart Answers at Ask.com, within the ExpertRank system.
Core Competencies
Developing Engineers & Leaders at Scale0-to-1 Product & Platform Build
Applied Artificial Intelligence (AI) / Machine Learning (ML) & Generative AI (GenAI)Opex/Capex Impact
Cloud-Native Architecture (AWS)Distributed Systems
Organizational Design & ScalingPlatform & Security Engineering
Identity & Access Management (IAM)Observability & Engineering Excellence
Search, Relevance & Recommendation SystemsExecutive Stakeholder Management
What Colleagues Say
“There aren’t many people who can say they fundamentally changed the way Amazon did things; you are definitely one of them.”
Sr. Applied Science Manager (PhD), AWS Security
“The best leader I’ve had in my civilian career, by far - improving the lives and livelihoods of everyone who got to work for you.”
Senior Leader, AWS (ex-McKinsey; U.S. Special Forces)
“What you built was something I always pointed to as done right.”
Engineering Manager, Google
Patent Application, Certifications & Education
- Named inventor, U.S. patent application (US 2013/0103814, shared media experience; CBS Interactive).
- Machine Learning Certification, Stanford University.
- Advanced Prompt Engineering; hands-on with agentic AI development tooling (Claude Code, Kiro).
- Citrus College, A.A., Music.
- CliftonStrengths (2026): Strategic · Achiever · Activator · Restorative · Belief.
Board & Community
- Martinsburg Union Rescue Mission, Assistant Secretary, Board of Directors (2011-2013).
Playbooks
- LLM Reasoning Playbook: a practical reference on advanced prompting architectures (Chain / Tree / Graph of Thought, ReAct, and more), covering what each is, when to use it, copy-paste templates, and a selection flowchart. New to this? Start with Build Your Recipe and answer seven quick questions to walk away with a ready-to-paste plan.